ColloquiaTalk by Wu Chang Feng - Tuesday, October 29

[Margery Ishmael]

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TOYOTA TECHNICAL INSTITUTE
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Date: Tuesday, October 29th, 2002

Time: 3:00 p.m.

Place: Ryerson Hall 251

Speaker: Wu Chang Feng, Oregon Graduate Institute

Title: On the Compatibility of TCP Reno & TCP Vegas

Abstract: Despite a plethora of research demonstrating the superiority
of TCP Vegas over TCP Reno, Reno is still the most widely deployed
implementation of TCP. The primary reason for this predicament is due
to the alleged incompatibility of Vegas with Reno. While Vegas in
isolation performs better with respect to overall network utilization,
stability, fairness, throughput and packet loss, and burstiness; its
performance is generally awful in any environment where Reno
connections exist. Consequently, there exists no incentive for any
operating system to adopt TCP Vegas. This talk will show that the
accepted (default) configuration of Vegas is indeed incompatible with
TCP Reno. However, with a careful analysis of how Reno and Vegas use
buffer space in routers, Reno and Vegas can be made compatible with
one another if Vegas is configured properly. Furthermore, we show
that overall network performance actually improves with the addition
of properly configured Vegas flows competing head-to-head with Reno
flows, thus lending credence to the incremental adoption of Vegas.

Biography: Dr. Feng received a B.S. degree in computer engineering and
a B.S. (Honors) degree in music from Penn State University in 1988; an
M.S. degree in computer engineering from Penn State University in
1990; and a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996. He is currently a technical
staff member and team leader of RADIANT (Research & Development in
Advanced Network Technology) at Los Alamos National Laboratory and an
adjunct assistant professor at the Ohio State University. He is a
fellow of the Los Alamos Computer Science Institute and the founder
and director of the Advanced Summer Curriculum for Emerging Network
Technologies (ASCENT). Before joining LANL in 1998, Dr. Feng had
previous professional stints at Ohio State University, Purdue
University, University of Illinois, NASA Ames Research Center, and IBM
T.J. Watson Research Center.

*Refreshments will be served after the talk in Ryerson 255*

If you wish to meet with the speaker, please send e-mail to Meridel Trimble 
mtrimble at uchicago.edu